The pace of business, whether domestic or international, is accelerating. At the same time the geography of business has become increasingly global and its morphology more complex and intertwined. Time and information are the most precious commodities of business today. Hence, the tremendous increase in the use of facsimile transmissions, in many cases supplanting postal services.
Pitney Bowes Corporation Facsimile Systems Division commissioned The Gallup Organization for three consecutive years (1992-1994) to conduct market research to determine a measurement of facsimile usage and applications of daily facsimile users at Fortune 500 Corporations and Dun & Bradstreet mid-sized companies in the United States. The Gallup Organization randomly sampled four hundred (400) daily facsimile users at Fortune 500 companies during the first quarter of each of the four going three years. In 1993 Dun & Bradstreet mid-sized companies (100-500 employees) were added to the study.
In 1994 the majority of facsimile users at both Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies stated that their facsimile utilization had increased over the past year and that it would increase in the coming years. The average daily outgoing facsimile volume for a typical facsimile user at a Fortune 500 company averaged 41.4 documents per day from 1992 to 1994, averaging 4.7 pages per facsimile transmission. Thus, a typical user at a Fortune 500 company averaged approximately two hundred (200) pages of facsimile transmission per day during this period. During the same period atypical user at a mid-sized company sent an average of 33.8 documents per day via facsimile averaging 3.5 pages per document. The utilization of facsimile transmissions by typical users at mid-sized companies was approximately one hundred twenty (120) pages per day.
Eleven percent (11%) of Fortune 500 and seven percent (7%) of mid-sized company facsimiles were sent to international destinations outside the United States during the period of the survey. The top five countries were the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada and Mexico. It is interesting to note that no Asian countries were listed other than Japan. The same survey taken today would undoubtedly show higher facsimile transmission rates to Asia.
Only five percent (5%) of 1994 Fortune 500 and two percent (2%) of mid-sized company users reported sending facsimile transmissions during the evening or night when dialing rates are cheaper.
In the first quarter of 1994 The Gallup Organization undertook a survey Fortune 500 telecommunication managers focused on facsimile costs and management policies. Fortune 500 telecommunications managers reported that thirty-six percent (36%) of their total telephone charges were related to facsimile transmissions, twenty point one percent (20.1%) for long distance and five percent (5%) for international. International long-distance is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over fourteen percent (14%) over the next two to three years. Half of the Fortune 500 companies expected their facsimile charges to increase in the coming years by an average of twelve percent (12%). These managers ranked facsimile as one of the most productive telecommunication systems within their company, second only to voice mail.
Fortune 500 companies spend on average $2.9 million per corporate location for annual telephone services. On this basis approximately one million dollars is spent annually per location for facsimile services of which approximately $600,000 is for long distance facsimile transmission and $150,000 is for international facsimile transmission.
Interestingly, even with the availability of electronic mail ("E-mail" or "e-mail") services and the ability to send facsimile transmissions directly from a personal computer ("PC") with a modem, facsimile transmissions continue to increase and are expected to do so for the coming years. Further, facsimile usage is just as high for companies that use e-mail as for those that do not.
To send a facsimile a person walks to the facsimile machine, inserts the document to be transmitted, dials the destination telephone number and activates the facsimile machine. The sending machine dials the receiving facsimile machine number and when it answers sends the document to the receiving machine. Traditional facsimile transmissions are sent over the Public Switched Telephone Network ("PSTN") just like a voice telephone call. Facsimile machines contain modems (MODulator/DEModulator) which transmit and receive data transmissions over a voice telephone circuit.
The user pays the local and long-distance telephone company charges prevailing at the time he or she sends the facsimile transmission. This can be particularly expensive for international facsimile transmissions.
Advanced-featured facsimile machines, more expensive than basic machines, enable the user to store documents for transmission at a later time. This capability is constrained by the amount of memory in the facsimile machine in which to store documents and requires programming by the user. As is described above, deferred or delayed transmission is not widely utilized. For international transmissions the delay process is further complicated by the need to know or look-up the time periods in which cheaper international dialing rates apply.
The most common modem speed in facsimile machines has been 9600 bits per second ("bps") for quite a long period of time. In many parts of the world, however, facsimile machines are still in use that transmit data at 4800 bps and slower speeds. Newer and more expensive facsimile machines today contain modems capable of operating at speeds up to 14,400 bps (14.4 kbps). However, the ability to use the higher speeds is dependent upon the quality of the telephone line connection between the originating and destination facsimile machines. The slower the speed of the modem, the longer it takes to send a facsimile transmission. In the United States today one page of text takes less than a minute to send; in some parts of the world the same page of text can take up to three minutes to send. The cost implications are obvious.
What is today commonly referred to as the Internet began as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") project in 1969 (at that time "ARPA") entitled Resource Sharing Computer Networks. The object of this project was to develop a robust network across the country that would keep military sites in communication in the event of a nuclear war. Since this project was funded by ARPA, it was generally referred to as ARPANET. The ARPANET, which operated until 1990, consisted entirely of 56 kbps lines linking sixteen cities across the United States. Its use was restricted to the United States Department of Defense ("DOD") and its contractors.
ARPANET was in every sense experimental. From 1969 to 1983 a lot of different packet switching schemes were tried. The term "Internet" was probably first applied to a 1973 research program that culminated in a demonstration system in 1977. It demonstrated networking through various media, including satellite, radio, telephone, ethernet and the like using packet switching. The Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol ("TCP/IP"), a packet switching protocol, is what grew out of ARPANET's experiments.
In 1984 the National Science Foundation ("NSF") established an office for networking with the objective of tying together universities and other research establishments. Their first efforts at a national backbone NSF Network ("NFSNet") was deployed in 1986 as a 56 kbps network. In 1987, NSF contracted with Merit, a non-profit corporation comprised of some eleven Michigan Universities, to build a national backbone network using T-1 1.544 Mbps links to sixteen cities. IBM and MCI joined together to form a subsidiary company entitled Advanced Network Services, Inc. ("ANS") and Merit awarded a subcontract to them to actually build a T-1 network. In the interim, a number of universities and research groups got access to ARPANET. In a very real sense the NFSNet was more of an evolution of ARPANET than an entirely new network.
There was enormous controversy over the switching technology to increase the NSFNet backbone to T-3 speeds of 45 Mbps as late as 1993. In fact, for several years, the packet switches that ANS used did not really switch data packets fast enough to actually achieve 45 Mbps links. But by late 1993, the T-3 network was more or less working. On Apr. 30, 1995, operation of the NSFNet backbone ceased.
Backbone bandwidth refers to the carrying capacity of the top level links connecting various metropolitan areas around the world. Today the Internet consists of as many as eighteen national backbone networks operated by private companies, all interconnected in a few cities. These interconnections take place in several Network Access Points ("NAP's"). The backbones are almost all T-3 links operating at 45 Mbps. Furthermore, these backbones have been extended internationally.
In March 1996, MCI announced that it had increased the speed of its entire backbone to 155 Mbps. Other Internet Service Providers ("ISP's") have made similar announcements.
The problem of providing an easy, reliable and low-cost method for automatically routing and transporting facsimile traffic at high speeds has presented a major challenge to persons skilled in the telecommunications field. The development of methods and apparatus that would overcome this problem would constitute a major technological advance and would satisfy a long felt need within the telephony and electronics industries.